It’s not the media. It’s social media. What’s killing Israel’s reputation among young Christians in the United States is the facts.
The New Christian Right, Aug 15, 2026
Scores of young American evangelicals arrived in Israel for a “Potemkin Pilgrimage,” a propagandic, state-sponsored tour of Israel designed to get young evangelicals to support Israel again. It’s basically an awareness tour, sponsored by the Israeli government, to help win back young people who have Internet access and have seen the horrific things Israel does regularly. By August 11, the Jerusalem News Syndicate was publishing their testimonials and relaying what sounded like “born again” experiences, except instead of dedicating their lives to Christ, they’ve dedicated their lives to the Israeli state. The trip “had changed them.” The “media had misled” them. Christians “needed to speak up.” One participant said Christians could no longer “stay silent.” Another came away convinced that Israel was being unfairly portrayed abroad.
The timing was almost comical, because three days later, the Associated Press published a lengthy report about Christians in Israel increasingly afraid to wear visible signs of their faith because of harassment from Jewish religious extremists. Priests and nuns described being spat upon. Christian property has been vandalized. A Catholic nun was violently attacked in Jerusalem badly enough that Jewish volunteers began escorting Christian clergy through the city for their protection. Even with an escort, AP watched a teenager spit behind one of the nuns as she passed a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Like, that happened while a journo was watching, randomly, because that’s how often it happens. Five days before that, the Israeli military had taken the extraordinary step of effectively closing the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh to Israeli outsiders. The reason was not Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad or some marauding band of Muslims. It was Jews. The IDF said the order was necessary because of violent attacks by Israeli settlers in the area, not on Israeli settlers, but by them. Taybeh is one of the last remaining entirely Christian Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Its Christians have complained about repeated settler incursions, attacks on property and a growing sense that nobody is protecting them. That’s because nobody is protecting them.
On August 5, according to the local Catholic priest, settlers broke into the home of one of his parish families. Four days later, the Israeli military finally restricted Israeli access to the village to keep the settlers out. Of course, it also punished the town, because it keeps out things and people that the Christians need. This is the public-relations nightmare Israel now faces among American evangelicals, happening at the same time that teary-eyed teenagers are coming fresh off their Israel tours, talking about how the nation is misrepresented in the press.
For decades, Israel barely needed public relations with the United States. Evangelical support was baked into the cake, and Israel possessed an enormous American constituency that had been taught that supporting the modern Jewish state was not merely prudent foreign policy, but Christian obedience. Pastors supplied the theology, prophecy conferences supplied the urgency, Republican politicians supplied the talking points, and Christian television supplied the pictures of the Holy Land.
The children and grandchildren of those evangelicals are no longer cooperating. Thank God.
Meanwhile, Christianity Today reported this week that evangelical attitudes toward Israel have fallen to their lowest level yet recorded in recent Pew polling. Favorability toward the Israeli people among white evangelicals has dropped ten points since 2024, to 74 percent. Only 57 percent now view the Israeli government favorably. In April, Pew found that just 65 percent of white evangelicals viewed Israel itself favorably.
The generational numbers are uglier. New reporting this week on the growing revolt against Christian Zionism cited 2025 University of Maryland polling in which only 51 percent of older evangelicals sympathized more with Israelis than Palestinians. Among evangelicals under 35, that number was 24 percent.
Again, Praise God. Those are not an ordinary polling fluctuation. That is a succession crisis. So, John Hagee can fill an auditorium with Christians waving Israeli flags, Mike Huckabee can quote Genesis, Mike Evans can assemble pastors, and Benjamin Netanyahu can speak fluent evangelicalese about civilization, biblical destiny and Judeo-Christian values. But eventually the people in those auditoriums die. The question going forward is what their children believe, and they’re not in favor of the systemic persecution of Christians or the genocide of Arabs. It’s not because their opinion of Muslims is growing – those poll numbers are also in the toilet. It appears younger evangelicals are thinking for themselves and determining from looking at the facts that both groups are terrible, and are choosing instead to care about the Christians in Palestine.
Israel has clearly figured this out, because it is behaving like a country watching one of its most valuable American political assets depreciate in real time. Which makes sense, because it is. Their “outreach” to young evangelicals is in turn becoming more organized, more explicit, and increasingly aimed at convincing them to embrace their Dispensational Sunday School lessons and ignore whatever they see on the nightly news.
That is what makes last week’s Jerusalem trip interesting. The young evangelicals weren’t merely tourists interviewed while visiting the Holy Land by pure happenstance. Their presence belongs to a much larger effort to put young Christians physically inside Israel, introduce them to Israelis, be toured around the carnage of Gaza so that it’s not seen or thought about, and counter what they are seeing online and send them home prepared to defend the country.
And while those young evangelicals were learning in Jerusalem that Israel has been unfairly maligned, Christians who actually live there were telling the Associated Press that they are being systemically persecuted by the state, giving tours and finger sandwiches to American Christian teenagers and college students.
The problem is larger than hypocrisy becuase Israel’s old evangelical coalition was built in an information environment that no longer exists. A pastor could tell his congregation what was happening in Israel on Sunday morning, explain the prophetic significance on television, and most Christians had neither the information nor the inclination to investigate further. But a twenty-two-year-old evangelical now carries Gaza in his pocket. It’s not a “rise of antisemitism” causing American evangelicals to give up supporting Israel. It’s not access to cable news. Major media aren’t brainwashing them, as Israel alleges. Besides, the vast majority of American media outlets are squarely in Israel’s shirt pocket. They’re instead being inundated with the personal, first-hand accounts of Christians inside Israel and the footage coming from Citizen journalists in Gaza and Lebanon.
Israel wants you to think it’s “the news.” It’s not. It’s the facts, directly from social media coming from inside the hot zone where Christian churches are burned down, nuns are attacked, pilgrims are spit on, and where IDF soldiers are acting out atrocities on live feeds.
That cannot be fixed with another prophecy conference. So Israel is trying something much larger. It is building a new generation of evangelical supporters on purpose. And what has happened over the last few weeks shows exactly why.
The Associated Press piece, available here and published just yesterday, describes the problem perfectly. Christians living in Israel are increasingly worried that simply looking Christian in public will make them targets for harassment by religious Jews. They began with a Mexican Catholic nun named Sister Mayela walking to work in Jerusalem’s Old City. She has lived in Jerusalem on and off for more than twenty years, but she no longer makes the walk alone. She has to have a literal bodyguard.
Another Catholic nun was violently attacked in Jerusalem in April. A Jewish man from a West Bank settlement is the one who attacked her. Sister Mayela told AP that the attack frightened her because Jerusalem “no longer feels like the place she remembers.” Spitting happened before, and always has, but she says Christians once moved around with considerably more confidence. That’s when the aforementioned journalist saw the spitting in real-time, which is either pretty incredible timing or Jews just go around spitting on Christians literally all the time.
It’s the latter. But he claimed he was just clearing his throat. Her escort reported him to police. They did nothing.
The Religious Freedom Data Center tracks anti-Christian harassment in Jerusalem. According to AP, recorded incidents have nearly tripled, comparing four years ago with the most recent three-month period. The organization is now recording roughly one incident every day, with virtually all of them attributed to Jewish religious nationalists (also known as Zionists).
Rev. Alberto Pari, secretary of the Catholic Custody of the Holy Land and its official responsible for Christian-Jewish relations, described the situation with depressing casualness. Walk around Jerusalem in clerical clothing long enough, he told AP, and eventually somebody will spit near you.
Nor is spitting the worst of it. Around the same time as the attack on the nun, an Israeli soldier smashed a crucifix displayed in a family’s garden. Another Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon put a cigarette into the mouth of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Israel has also appointed George Deek, a Christian Arab diplomat, as an envoy to the Christian world. He’s the guy who’s paid to convince Christians that Israel super cares about us.
Deek’s April 2026 appointment as Israel’s first special envoy to the Christian world came directly amid a series of damaging scandals straining ties between church leaders and the Jewish state, including Cardinal Pizzaballa and senior clergy being blocked by police from Palm Sunday services at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and an IDF soldier appearing to destroy the statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon. He’s not a diplomat who happens to be Christian. He’s damage control, timed to a crisis, run out of the same Foreign Ministry that budgets $750 million-plus a year to manipulate American Christians. His signature argument, repeated across the media, is that Christians fell from roughly 20% of the Middle East’s population to about 4% in two decades, used to frame Israel as the exception and the safe haven. In other words, his job is to point and argue, “Muslims are worse.” He ignores the argument from many that the Christian reduction in the Middle East is largely due to the destablization caused by Israel’s foreign policy.
Israelis themselves admit that systemic Christian harassment is a problem. John Munayer of Jerusalem’s Rossing Center told AP that the principal threat comes from Jewish Zionists, particularly young men. They regard Christian practices as idolatry, and follow the Talmud’s teachings on how to treat “idolaters.” Ironically, Rabbinic teachings do not classify Islam as idolatry (because they regard Islam, but not Christianity, to be monotheistic), so their treatment of Muslims is considerably better than Christians. But many of those Israelis who acknowledge the problem claim that it is “inherited hostility toward Christianity” because of the “historical persecution of Jews in Christian Europe.” Others just don’t want non-Jews around Jewish sacred places. Of course, those are actually Christian sacred places.
And then AP traveled outside Jerusalem to Taybeh, one of the West Bank’s few remaining Christian villages, where Catholic priest Bashar Fawadleh said Israeli settlers recently cut through residential fences and destroyed fruit and vegetable gardens. Residents told AP that settlers were coming and going continually and that people were afraid. The problem became serious enough that this week the Israeli military declared Taybeh a closed military zone for Israelis specifically to stop Israeli settler attacks. Reuters independently confirmed the military’s explanation.
But here the story collides head-on with American evangelicals. AP asked the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem about Taybeh. ICEJ is not an anti-Israel organization. It is one of the most reliably pro-Israel evangelical institutions on earth. Its spokesman David Parsons called what is happening in Taybeh “really troubling.”
Then he explained why Israeli leaders should care. Christian support for Israel, he said, is a strategic interest. It’s strategic because evangelicals are the only demographic in the United States not completely fed up with Israel, and that support is slipping. So, Israel is spending money and political capital trying to preserve Christian support abroad at the moment Christians living under its authority are generating headlines about spitting, assaults, vandalism and settler violence at home. The Israeli government knows those two stories cannot remain separated forever.
For decades, American evangelicals were given a remarkably simple picture of Middle Eastern Christianity. Muslims persecute Christians. Israel protects them. Therefore, Christians should support Israel. The Christians actually inside Israel tell a much different story, and they have cameras. Younger evangeliclas are listening.